By Night the Mountain Burns

September 29, 2014
In this poignant novel by one of Equatorial Guinea’s most celebrated authors, a series of tragedies strikes a small Atlantic Ocean isle after a foreign fishing vessel appears off the coast. In payment for loitering in the island’s waters, the boat’s crew gives tobacco and a portion of the fish they’ve caught to the locals. After they accept the sailors’ tithes, and after one of the mariners impregnates a girl from the island, the mountain is accidentally set ablaze, a senior ministrant dies, a woman is beaten to death, and a cholera outbreak kills hundreds. The islanders believe their hardships are due to the Saltwater King. By making a collective offering to the sea, they hope to satisfy the deity’s hunger and change their fate. Laurel’s approach is ethnographic and uses an islander’s first-person perspective to provide brief histories of the culture, terrain, and habitat. Although the narrative voice is sometimes repetitive and intentionally elusive, the descriptions of the island’s creatures, customs, language, and lore lead to clever revelations in the plot. The choice in point of view is one of the book’s strongest aspects, and the unnamed narrator’s conversational, indirect style is fitting. This fascinating story emerges from the speaker’s inquiries into the identities and social laws of his community, and from his attempts to make sense of the calamities of his homeland.

December 1, 2014

Born in Equatorial Guinea, Avila Laurel went into exile in Barcelona after a hunger strike in 2011 protesting the rule of President Obiang. The narrative, which draws on memories of the author's childhood on the island of Annobon, vividly relates a world that's relentlessly on edge. Mothers leave children with relatives as they go to work on the plantations, and cholera or fire can sweep in to destroy crops, families, and possessions. Quietly crafted, like the canoe in the book's opening pages; an illuminating read.

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